We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Pollyanna Blanco. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Pollyanna below.
Pollyanna, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.
Our comfort zones can get quite cozy. While a part of us dreams of moving forward, another part of us drags its heels. The resistance we can feel to change can be so great that we end up settling for hanging out in our familiar discomfort zone. This push-pull dance was something I contended with when I first had the inkling that there was a book inside of me.
Initially, thoughts poured onto the page with an inspired frenzy. The next morning after my dopamine hang-over, I took one look over what I had written only to crumple it into a ball for my cat Magoo to bat chaotically across the living room floor. That activated the beginning of following my creative-intuitive impulse to birth a book while attempting to drive forward with the parking brake on. This bumpy soulful relationship with it played out over ten years until it saw the light of day on a bookshelf.
I remember that very first day I sat down to scribble down in sprawling cursive, “I know there’s a book inside of me and I have no idea what it’s about”. In hindsight, the beauty of the messy creative process I went through while writing the book ultimately turned out to be transformational. In the mosh pit of crumpled pages, and my on-again, off-again flings with it, what emerged was a book about creative courage. A guidebook to encourage people to follow their creative-intuitive impulses without throwing in the towel prematurely so that they can navigate the plot twists of life and grow through them. At the end of the day, every tumultuous moment of fear, doubt, and hesitancy was transmuted into fertilizer for the soul.
Pollyanna, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
The journey since the first twirls in my mother’s womb has been a creative one even before fully recognizing what that truly meant. From a young age, I was encouraged to write, draw, and paint. I loved using my imagination to call things into being and I was fascinated by color and light, instinctively practicing energy healing on myself, sensitive to the nuances of the world around and within me.
From ballet to ballroom, I trained and danced for 40 years, and taught beginner ballroom dance classes in the evenings while being a high school visual arts and special education teacher by day. In tandem, for over twenty years now I’ve been passionate about studying and practicing energy healing, working with chakras, crystals, ceremony, ascension, and angels, and weaving these esoteric and holistic approaches together with dance movement healing. I attended the Transformational Arts College in Toronto, became a Reiki Master, and a licensed Chakradance Facilitator, a Heart Math Building Personal Resiliency Mentor, and more.
I’ve also traveled to Cozumel for two decades exploring a magnetic connection to the spirit of place through the Mayan creativity Goddess Ix Chel, holding sacred ceremonies with Mayan Priestesses, hosting a women’s retreat, and donating workshops to the local community. By stepping out of the spiritual closet and following the creative breadcrumbs on my inner awakening journey as a light worker I am now called to serve as a Creative Midwife and Sacred Self-Care Coach.
Right now, more than ever the world needs us to share our sacred soul gifts with the world! There are so many beautiful creative souls out there who are awakening to their greater vision and mission and are looking to transition into work, and relationships that are aligned with their true selves. They’re sensing there’s something more they came here to express and be.
As a Creative Midwife, I help people to move consciously through the contractions of their old way of being as they expand through the creative process while birthing their dreams into a beautiful reality. One of the greatest challenges is integrating a new awareness of what it’s like to be slowing down while still moving forward so they can restore equilibrium between being out there in the world while connected within their inner imaginative world. By guiding them to restore the sacred to their self-care they discover how to tune into a dynamic creative flow that invites them to show up for themselves in their inner world as much as the outer one.
Often they bump up against an ingrained tendency to figure it out with their heads alone. This logical mindset default can leave them confused from spinning out in overthinking, doubt, hesitancy, and fear. In other instances, as free spirits, they need support integrating their inspiration into deliberate passionate action to ground their dreams into being. I provide an intuitive, multidimensional approach within an ascension context. Simply said, I guide them to glean their inner gifts in the grit by helping them to restore a connection to their divine creativity. I walk beside them and champion their spiritual tenacity with sincerity, love, and presence so that they are divinely empowered to listen, connect, and trust their highest guidance and embody the frequency of that which their souls yearn to create.
By intuiting a customized creative process for them to move through they gain increased awareness and clarity about their sacred soul offerings so all aspects of themselves can be on board. So rather than starting with a mental plan of action or focusing on strategy first, they focus on receiving the benefits of their offerings and journaling their experiential journey. By integrating the insights that emerge into an embodied experience they receive clarity about the next right and inspired action steps for them to take from within. The Sacred Self-Care Coaching weaves in with that. Often lightworkers, creatives, and entrepreneurs have a burning desire that if nourished and cared for well will prevent them from burning out along their journey.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
When I finally saw the shape of an idea emerging through my writing and started getting some traction while writing my book my outer home life was getting quite rocky. My then-teen-stepson of a couple of years was walking a tightrope of multiple mental health challenges that exponentially accelerated to a fever pitch. The soul growth and learning for my family took us through many a tempest and I can remember coming across a reference I had read that Barbara Hand Clow shared about the Mayan culture holding a belief that creating is more fun than curing.
That resonated so profoundly with me at that time. I can remember sitting at my kitchen table, with an Angelite stone beside me and a river rock with the words “the rest” on it every time I sat down to write, while weird atonal guitar music wailed from the basement underscoring random moments with a jolt. The writing was the one place where I could co-create something positive with the divine that emboldened my hope and faith that better, healthier, happy times lay ahead while so many things around me seemed to be spinning out of control despite my most sincere efforts to be part of the healing solution.
The capacity to fervently hold a vision and take passionate action no matter what is going on around me is a choice I’ve made many times throughout challenging moments in my life. It has helped me to see my book through a messy time in life and has shown me repeatedly in many other instances how to expand beyond believing life is happening to me, to for me, to through me, to ultimately knowing it is happening as me. Everything I perceive as out there is a soul mirror gifting me to claim soul lessons that teach one essential piece of wisdom – there is only one of us.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
As a spiritually focused wellness entrepreneur, while teaching secondary school full-time for 28 years now, I’ve been discovering how to weave and unite the seeming divide between the mundane and divine. After my first book, In Rhythm With Your Soul (Deeper Well), came out in 2014, it set me on an entrepreneurial path of amplified inner growth and expansion. I shifted away from competitive ballroom dance into becoming a licensed Chakradance Facilitator to offer a complementary dance healing movement experience that aligned with the book.
In the mosh pit of daily life, like so many, as I was juggling multiple roles, my ego bumped up against my edges over and over again regarding perceived limits around time and energy. Integrating the esoteric with the mundane and grounding it in a business has been a huge growth experience. I can remember when I was inhaling one business strategy after another, cramming every bit of learning around my full-time teaching schedule because as much as I paid lip service to divine timing for my business, while in my shadow I was impatiently thinking it was all taking too long and the next bright shiny strategy was going to be “it”.
From the first humble webinar, which I recorded in front of three people, I had to learn that strategy plus mindset plus sacred self-care is the ultimate combo. Initially, like so many starting I believed more was better, evidently after investing countless hours into creating over one hundred slides. I was so self-conscious about showing up on live video. My inner perfectionist was on a rampage and had placed enormous pressure on me to get it “right”. The most amusing part in hindsight, although in the heat of the moment it was anything but that, was how the universe had a way of ‘playing’ with my insecurities so I could transform them. The house painters showed up unexpectedly that morning and started scraping old paint off of the outside window fifteen minutes before my webinar. Talk about soul mirroring. What in me invited this to be?! My nervous system was smoking and sizzling at the sound of it.
Looking back, thankfully that experience tested my tenacity and my spiritual toolbox and I treaded through my inner muck and did the webinar anyway. After that, with patience, time, and tenacity it got so much easier. Now I’m so much more flexible and adaptable when it comes to navigating the inevitable plot twists, and often more frequently with a knowing grin.
One of the biggest ‘a-ha’ moments has been that done is better than ‘perfect’ which is perfect from the soul’s perspective, and I don’t have to go it alone in my business. When I connect with like-minded and like-hearted soul sisters I learn so much with and from them. The process of consciously linking arms and co-creating together is mutually empowering and supportive. Everything flows and feels more natural. Collaborating is essential for spiritual, creative, and business growth whether it’s a podcast interview, a healing circle, or an innovative equity-focused online platform like Regal Resilience that’s about restoring the sacred to our economic system in which I’m a founding circle member.
For so many years I tinkered away with my entrepreneurial pursuits on my own which made me more susceptible to losing a sense of perspective, being too hard on myself, and working far longer hours than I could be truly productive. I had to unwind many old programs around success, being vulnerable, being in my heart rather than my head, and that not having it all figured out is okay Instead, I’ve learned to value slowing down through rest and play, trusting my intuitive guidance, stepping out of the spiritual closet, and embracing the creative process as much as the outcome. Restoring the sacred to my self-care has also helped me to restore the sacred to the care and feeding of my business. and how I choose to serve from peace and plenty.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.pollyannablanco.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pollyannablanco/
- Facebook: Pollyanna Blanco: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100005170127341, Luminous Lightworker: https://www.facebook.com/groups/luminouslightworker. Pollyanna Blanco Sacred Self-Care Coach: https://www.facebook.com/InRhythmwithYourSoul, Pollyanna Blanco Chakradance Facilitator: https://www.facebook.com/pollyannadancer
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pollyanna-blanco-b96a6b62/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@multidimensionalmuse9668
- Other: https://www.regalresilience.com/@pollyanna188926
Image Credits
Zdenka Darula
Magenta Photo Studio
Evently Photography